Teacher guide — Grade 9, Unit 8: Grade 9 project: which districts are changing?¶

Time: 2 lessons + project (about 4 periods). Track: A/B (project).

#	Lesson	Time
1	Plan and clean	40–45 min
2	Analyse and present	40–45 min
P	Unit project: Which districts are changing?	2 periods

Before you start¶

Materials: Notebook notebooks/project_template.ipynb; poster paper.
Read docs/pedagogy/lesson-anatomy.md and docs/pedagogy/ai-use-policy.md.

If you have no computers / no internet¶

The project can be done in a spreadsheet or on paper with a printed extract.

Common misconceptions¶

Skipping the Plan step leads to aimless charts.
A poster without a 'what we cannot say' box.

Differentiation¶

Support: give a partially filled table / sentence starters; pair with a data-steward role.
Stretch: ask "what would change your conclusion?" and "who is missing?"

Answer key (check questions)¶

Lesson 1: Plan and clean 1. What does a plan card contain?
Answer: Question, variables, rate/denominator, data source, risks. 2. Why log cleaning steps?
Answer: So others can check and repeat them. 3. Name one risk in district tables.
Answer: Sizes differ, so counts mislead; use rates.

Lesson 2: Analyse and present 1. What are the three parts of a conclusion?
Answer: Claim, evidence, reasoning (plus a limit). 2. Why an oral check?
Answer: To show you understand your own work. 3. What goes in the limit box?
Answer: What the data cannot tell us.

Assessment¶

Starter quiz each lesson (3 questions, one recalling the previous lesson); unit quiz in quiz.yml; project marked with the rubric in docs/pedagogy/assessment.md; 2-minute oral check per group.

Alignment¶

Optional Computer Science (Grades 9–10): databases/SQL and introductory programming; compulsory ICT/Maths data handling.

Answers: practice exercises¶

e.g. "Which belt has the highest people-abroad rate?", "Do bigger districts have larger households?", "How does literacy vary across provinces?"; cannot: "Why do people migrate?" or anything about change over time (one year only).
Question as given; data: districts table (synthetic); variables population, households, province; summary: weighted household size = sum population ÷ sum households per province; chart: bar chart by province; risks: synthetic data, households defined differently in real census, averages hide variation within provinces.
Winter 92.9, autumn 55.9, spring 50.4, monsoon 12.85 µg/m³ → autumn is second (close to spring).
e.g. "In 2019–2020 (synthetic data), winter PM2.5 (median 92.9 µg/m³) was about seven times the monsoon level (12.9 µg/m³); the whole winter box plot lies above the monsoon one. Limit: one station, synthetic data, 29 days missing."
"Is that the literacy rate of the people in the belt?" Answer: no, it is the average district; the weighted rate would need literate-people counts (Units 1 and 7).
Missing/invalid days by month: Jan 1, Feb 2, Mar 6, Apr 1, May 3, Jun 5, Jul 1, Sep 2, Oct 1, Nov 4, Dec 3 — spread over the year, only a few per month, so they are unlikely to change the seasonal conclusion; but missing days in polluted months slightly lower those months' totals if values were filled with zeros (they must not be).
Example: "Do districts with more schools per 100,000 people have more girls enrolled per school?" — JOIN on district_id, compute two rates, scatter plot, r.
584 of 702 valid days ≈ 83%. Guidelines are revised (WHO changed it in 2021 from 25 to 15 µg/m³) and websites copy old values; quote the primary source with its year.

Plan-card and poster are marked with the six-criterion rubric (docs/pedagogy/assessment.md).

Real-data exercises: notes¶

R1 The real Kathmandu series shows the same strong winter peak and monsoon low; winter medians in the real data are typically far above the WHO guideline. Filter carefully: the file mixes parameters and locations.
R2 National annual growth 0.92% (NSO); Kathmandu valley and Terai districts grew; several hill and mountain districts (e.g. in Gandaki and Koshi hills) declined. Students must find their own province's figures.
R3 Approve the plan card before students download anything large.